Tectonic Activity

Part 4 of my railway modelling series brought the story up to the end of 2016, concluding with a note that I had mixed up the left-over Polyfiller I had been given. Unfortunately, I added too much water and thus it didn’t work particularly well. Over several more days, I layered on quite a bit of the additional filler I had bought. A week after I had applied it, the runny Polyfiller mix still hadn’t set (the new stuff was setting hard in under 24 hours). Since it was the leftovers of an old packet, I thought it may have got damp before I made it up and thus decided to scrape most of it off and redo it with my new plaster.

Looking Tasty: while plastering, I had irrational thoughts that it might be nice to eat some of the plaster, perhaps because it looked similar to butter icing for cakes.With the new year and the end of the holidays it was back the day job, reducing the time available for modelling. Weekend landscaping works continued (the evenings are too dark) on the layout, for a while. The chicken wire mentioned in the previous post has gone missing; so I won’t be needing the wallpaper paste I bought. In hindsight there wasn’t room for much landscaping anyway, so once I had finished off the top of the main hill by shaping the filler into a few ‘rocky crags’ there was no need for much more. I wasn’t sure about the crags, but one of my brothers took a look and thought they were ok. His feedback wasn’t so positive on other aspects though; one side of my cutting was too step and he felt the hills were too ‘plonk’ at one end of the board, rather than spreading out more. I had originally planned to make the larger hill extend further onto the board, but my grandmother pointed out that would eat into space for the station; hence the design that was built.

Bit-by-bit, I then started adding a rock-face effect to the cliff using foil (mostly Toblerone wrappings), scrunched up and then partly straightened, as a mould. I hadn’t got far with that before I discussed the steep side of the cutting with my grandmother. She agreed that it was too steep, so we took a chisel to it and reshaped it to a more-realistic profile, before I carried on with the rock-face effect.

All Iced Up: the plaster/filler has turned the hills into a winter wonderland, looking like they are covered with snow (or, alternatively, like a cake covered in icing)As the hills took shape, I started gluing down the rest of the cork tiles, cut to shape so that certain areas where there will not be track can be at a slightly lower level. I had only stuck three sections of cork when the PVA wood glue I had bought (and used on the chipboard) ran out. There may have been a little left that I couldn’t get out of the bottle, but even so that is almost 250ml of glue on my model already! Fortunately I had been given a large bottle of PVA labelled as being for sticking paper/card; I had intended to use that for ballasting in case PVA for paper isn’t the same as PVA for wood, but I figured it would stick the cork down alright too.

Disaster Area: close-up of the section suffering from cracks caused by ‘artificial earthquakes’.It was rather thick, gloopy glue, way past it’s use-by date I suppose, but I went ahead with it and just hoped it would stick. Perhaps because of the thickness of the glue, the last few sections of cork needed a lot of extra weight to press them down, and I even had to resort to hammering the cork flat with a wooden mallet at some of the joins where the cork was jutting up above adjacent pieces. This hammering caused ‘seismic activity’ in the baseboard which broke off part of the plaster on the small hill side of the cutting. I fixed that, by re-attaching the broken plaster with more of the stuff, but there are still a number of cracks in that part of the hill, perhaps caused by further hammering (which may have been the chiselling of the cutting mentioned above).

Cracking Model: Another view of the depressing results on that corner of the model (the chiselled cutting side is also visible)Once the Toblerone-wrapping work on the cliffs was almost completed, I started thinking a bit more about the design of the station area. I still haven’t decided whether I have space to expand the hill as my brother suggested, because I don’t know how big the car park will be, so I left a bit of the cliffs unfinished in case they get extended later. I did take a tape measure to our cars, to get an idea of how much space is needed, but never got round to scaling these down and making a parking-space-sized template to experiment with on the model. A combination of consultations to work on (principally the ones for the new Wales & Borders rail franchise) and general despondency given the cracked hill then put a halt to the project.

Snow On The Hills: a closer view of the larger hill section following the application of plaster/filler